Comments on Johnson, Kiesling, and Van Vleck

Extract

You have just heard from three people whose dissertations I helped select to be finalists for the Gerschenkron prize for the best dissertation on a non-U.S. country's economic history. They have now had a chance to tell you a bit of what their works are about. I could also do the same, but I will not. The reasons, at least to me, are obvious: (1) in writing them, they spent a lot more time than I did in reading them; (2) they are all long, and I only have a short time up here; (3) there are people in this audience who know far more about each of these subjects than do I, and I try to exercise some discretion when parading my ignorance (although I do think a Chinese economic historian—who first wrote on early twentieth-century Shanxi province's agricultural markets—being assigned the task of reading umpteen dissertations regarding “the rest of the world's economic histories, none about China,” has some rich irony within); and (4) that is not my job as I perceive it.